On Monday, December 8, Platinum Passholders have the opportunity to attend private site visits around San Francisco. In addition to learning how the site-visit companies create environments for big breakthroughs, you’ll hear directly about their vibes and values, get a tour of some inspiring spaces, and connect with other entrepreneurs who are leading change.
1) Highway1: Highway 1 is a San Francisco based hardware accelerator, with a focus on helping startups make the difficult transition from prototype to manufacture-ready design. Highway1 offers a 16 week program that includes $50,000 in seed capital, engineering support, prototyping facilities and a 10-day trip to Shenzhen in exchange for an equity stake of 4-7%. During the 16 weeks, teams use prototyping to explore and eliminate both technical and product risks. Frequently, small batches of products are hand-built and shipped to early customers. This process of refinement and risk elimination is especially critical for physical hardware products.
2) CreativeLive: CreativeLive empowers the creative world to learn what they want, when they want. Founded with the belief that world-class education can (and should) be available to everyone, CreativeLive connects photographers, crafters, musicians, and entrepreneurs of all walks of life with top-notch learning from industry leaders. Whether a weekend warrior or the newly full-time freelancer, CreativeLive gives students the tools and the encouragement to make it happen, whatever “it” might be for them.
3) Pivotal Labs: One of our most popular site visits last year, Pivotal Labs applies agile development techniques to accelerate time-to-market, reduce execution risk, and increase quality for all types of businesses from start-ups to global enterprise organizations. The company has also developed Pivotal Tracker, the award-winning project management tool. Pivotal Labs has worked with some of the most innovative companies in today’s market including Twitter, ModCloth, Gnip, and TaskRabbit. They believe building truly great software requires assembling and educating great teams.
4) 18F is transforming how the U.S. Government builds and buys digital services — we focus on user needs and work in a design-centric, agile, open, and data-driven way. Our projects focus on the interaction between government and the people and businesses it serves, helping agencies deliver on their mission through the development of digital and web services. Our newly formed organization, within the General Services Administration, encompasses the Presidential Innovation Fellows program and in-house digital delivery and consulting teams. We’re doers, recruited from the most innovative corners of industry and the public sector, who are passionate about driving efficiency, transparency, and savings for government agencies and the American people. We make easy things easy, and hard things possible.
